Legend Of The Lost Librarian
by Agggghhheptonygm
Summary: A story set occasionally in the Netherworld, but primarily in the Item World, being the adventures of Monty, the Netherworld Citadel's first and only librarian.
1. Chapter 1

**Legend Of The Lost Librarian**

A tale of wilderness, warfare and inconsistent alliteration

**Part the First**

I. Monty conducts an afternoon's business

The interior of the building that housed the Old Acheron Military Oddments Museum and Krichevskoy Memorial Presidential Library was suitably dank and dim, punctuated only by bright slices of sunlight falling through the faux-weatherbeaten roof. A semi-costly ventilation system pumped the correct amount of dust through the sunbeams, and ersatz clockwork rats scurried unconvincingly underfoot, their living counterparts having long since left to avoid the endless school excursion parties that flooded perennially through the gloomy vestibule.

One such party had been half-heartedly vandalizing the furniture in the sprawling non-fiction wing all afternoon, picking at cushions and stabbing tables with glazed eyes and archetypal demonling pouts. The scrape and whine of their jagged tin uniforms formed a cricket-like hum behind the buzz of conversation. Half the class were draped over dilapidated sofas, either singing out of tune or carefully ostracizing the few pupils who had curled up to read books, and the rest were clustered with the teacher on the floor, smoke pouring from their every cranial orifice, passing around vials of low-grade crack.

From behind her plant-festooned desk, Monty viewed them with tolerant amusement. A brief spurt of nostalgia trickled down her brain. Which cliques had she belonged to in her own distant school years? Had she been a nubile crack-fiend, a layabout, a demure reader? Something in-between, if memory served, which it seldom did. Her eyes followed a gangly zombie youth as he walked repeatedly into a bookcase, swearing inexpertly. The nostalgia was gone as swiftly as it had come, but it was all still a distraction from her awful romance novel. Proofreading this drivel, she reflected, was beginning to take its toll on not only her spare time, but also her vocabulary. There were only so many contrived synonyms for "tentacle", and she didn't want to know most of them.

An expiring rat ran into her foot, which had slipped aimlessly out of its shoe. She started a little, and reached down to re-wind its key, but jerked her hand back as, with a splintering "ping", the entire mechanism was efficiently dispatched by the rhododendron in the bottom drawer. Sixty hell on the expense account for a new rat. Another twenty-five to buy a preventive muzzle for the plant, which she should have done long ago. Perhaps another hundred and ten to buy a nicer pair of shoes for, er, work-related trauma. She smiled ruefully. Having sole charge of this run-down government-funded obsolescence had to have some perks.

Monty, it should be noted, had been Netherworld Citadel's sole presiding librarian of non-pornographic literary and military antiquities for approaching seventy-four years. The pay was moderate, the prerequisite qualifications were non-existent and the hours were utterly at her discretion. For a bookish lilim who sailed to complacent success at high school (much to her mother's consummate shame) there were simply no other job openings. She had given the museum-cum-library her time, her unswerving attention and even a diffident liking, and it had given her a place to sleep and reasonable pocket-money, a wealth of useless trivial knowledge, and little wrinkles around the corners of her eyes that belied her relatively young age. A decent trade, as far as she was concerned.

Her backstory was interrupted by a yell, louder than usual. One of the rowdier demons, his grin reaching past his horns, had taken hold of a book-reading fellow-pupil by the ankle and was attempting to light them on fire. She sighed resignedly and shot him in the fourth buttock with the small silver filigree crossbow that resided in the drawer beneath the "Hammer Ineffectually For Service" bell. The hubbub subsided markedly.

She leaned her elbows on the desk by the window, blinking at the sun, doodling on the back of her hand with a magnifying glass, wrinkling her nose at the smoke. The sight of young school demons rampaging through her shelves had once caused her far more worry - but that was before she took the elementary precaution of replacing all the actually valuable or irreplaceable books with dummies. No-one except the late Overlord had really been remotely interested in reading. He had in fact founded the library himself, while in the throes of his last illness; the "Memorial" tag had been a maudlin joke at his own expense. As was the funding - his estate paid the modest upkeep, which was comprised chiefly of Monty's salary and enough spare dosh to keep down the topological genus of the already colander-like roof. The other wing of the building, which housed the war museum, had been derelict for centuries immeasurable. Monty liked it that way; it was nice to be able to tell which exhibits you'd already visited purely by the disturbances in the dust.

The writing on her hand, soot black against the blue, now read "Gahhhhhh", with half another H trailing lazily away down her index finger. She dropped the magnifying glass absently, licking her hand to clear the burn. Her genus of demon typically had skin which carbonized lightly on the surface under extreme temperature and healed swiftly - it was useful for jotting down notes, although in her adolescence she'd often been thankful she wasn't into tattoos, as they would have lasted less than a week. Gahhhhhh? Presumably this rather limp erotica was boring her subconscious to tears. She looked balefully at the book out of the corner of her eye, wondering who would buy the bloody twaddle once the silk-shirt-'n'-dressing-gown-wearing ponce of an author deigned to release it. Probably, depressingly enough, thousands and thousands of twits.

Then, as often happened, her senses suddenly prickled. There was a certain palpable (if ineffectual) kind of menace about that open page. Behind the dull print, the plain black letters describing an improbably steamy diorama, there was something in the paper, between the thin fibres of reconstituted wood. A potent phrase from a human text she had flipped through once sprung to her mind. "When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you." She felt somehow that the book was looking back.

Whether consciously registering an antagonistic presence, or in simple annoyance at the book she had been scouring grimly for syntactical errors all day, she picked up a pen and jabbed it irritably at the page, leaving a neat little puncture and a mess of ink. The tension felt suddenly deflated. Her mind had already wandered back to the sunbeam, but she found herself suddenly thinking that maybe the book wasn't so bad after all; it was trash, sure, but it would appeal to its target demographic, and she'd get a nice cheque for wetnursing it to completion. She could even swear that there were fewer spelling mistakes than she remembered on the ink-blotted page.

II. Naps and catastrophes

The class had left. Monty had said the customary badbyes to the teacher, the second sentence she'd voiced aloud all day. The teacher acknowledged her with a flicker of his five crack-ravaged eyes, and shepherded the class out of the vestibule. One or two were actually gnawing on books as they went, but she didn't bother to retrieve them; they were from the teen fiction section. She had no illusions about the fact that the library now served the general populace only as an "etiquette"-training ground for if they ever should find themselves in a human or Celestian library. Buck it up there, you, you're supposed to eat them, not read them! The cosmopolitan view that three worlds' worth of reading had endowed her with sometimes made her feel that it was all a bit silly - how desperately the Netherworld strove to be the other worlds' polar opposite. Even demons could fathom the idea that actual food was a lot more palatable than books.

The sunbeams had dimmed noticeably as the afternoon wore on, and the rats had all wound down in inaccessible corners. Without the sun on her desk, she felt less languid and more inclined to just trudge upstairs and take a nap. There were no scheduled visits for the rest of the day, and casual patrons were almost unheard of. It wouldn't make any difference to anyone if she just took the afternoon off.

She gave her desk a perfunctory tidy, sweeping papers into the nearest drawers, kicking the wobbly leg of the chair back into a vertical position. A glance out the window confirmed that it was now quite overcast; there was even a patchy bank of fog tickling its way around the floating islands to the east. She yawned widely, revealing several rows of tiny triangular teeth, and snapped her mouth shut again with a satisfied click. A cold breeze was beginning to filter under the door-jam, and she wanted to be in bed before the chilly air woke her up again.

At a hand-clap, a narrow wooden ladder of highly untrustworthy appearance descended from the ceiling, and she began to climb. The ladder was a pain in the rump, but useful - it ensured that she was always tired enough to sleep soundly by the time she reached her room. She ascended through a troposphere of dust, a stratosphere of cobwebs and a thick wood-paneled mesosphere, finally clambering out on to the rough yellow carpet of her attic.

It wasn't a terribly demon-ish room; the spikes, syringes and sundry stabbing implements were displayed to a bare minimum, and the general demeanour was of cosy claustrophobia. Two huge, brooding bookcases dominated one wall, filled mostly with the rarities she'd rescued from downstairs. The table by her blanket-tangled nest of a bed had a plate on it, a small remainder of the cake she'd had the day before. She plumped herself down on the bed and stabbed it vigourously with a spoon. It had always been a childhood superstition of hers that the harder you jammed your cutlery into food, the better it tasted.

As her mouth concentrated on chewing the cake - which was indeed pretty good - a seldom-thought-of idea ran through her mind, looking for something substantial to connect to, but her head had already sunk into the pillow. She felt relaxed, at ease, and somehow powerful. A good day for lazing. All things considered, she had it pretty good here. A nice room, a steady job, a big old musty shack of knowledge... she was queen of the roost. Mistress of all she surveyed. Her eyes closed, and she was standing on the crest of a wave - no, the pages of a book - and tiny screaming imps in silk shirts and dressing gowns were scattering over the text, fleeing the waves of flame she dispensed with a flick of her finger.

Bang!

She rolled over irritably, partially awake again, grumbling and flapping a dismissive hand over her shoulder. If an ornament had fallen off a shelf, or a dire-pigeon had slammed itself into her window, she didn't want to know.

Bang! Thud!

Oh, the door. Sodding door.

Wump, clang, bang, rattle.

"Coming," she half-shouted, half growled. She unwound herself grouchily from the bedclothes and levered herself onto the floor. A glance at the clock revealed that she'd only managed to catch twenty minutes' sleep. She jammed her monocle back into her eye and patted disinterestedly at her hair.

Either not having heard her, or simply for the bloody-minded fun of it, the visitor continued to hammer away as she scrambled down the ladder. She strode through the vestibule and yanked the thick oak door open, with a snarl of "What?"

Her eyes, pointing level, surveyed an empty street. She hissed angrily, then felt a tentative prod at her knee, and looked down. A small Prinny, barely up to her waist, was standing on the doorstep, shifting his weight awkwardly from flipper to flipper. He had numerous official seals tucked into his pouch and an authoritative-looking clipboard of notes, but looked most alarmed to find himself face-to-leg with a bleary-eyed, tousled, barefoot and distinctly cross librarian.

"B-b-bad afternoon, m-miss, dood," he stammered, clicking his beak as sharply as the stitches would allow. He gulped, and by a palpable effort, seemed to regain some of his bureaucratic composure. "I represent the Citadel Planning and Destruction Committee, and I've been instructed to serve you this notice, dood."

Monty fixed him with a blank stare. "A notice?"

The Prinny shuffled nervously. "F-for relocation and demolition in two weeks' time, dood."

"I beg your pardon?"

He held forth the clipboard, rummaging through pages. "Here. This site's zoned for development, dood. See, on this, er, schematic. This whole disused block is being torn down, dood."

A cold sweat was beginning to prickle at the nape of Monty's neck. "Disused? I live here!"

The Prinny moved back almost imperceptibly, obviously anxious to preserve his skin. "Y-you've been assigned compensatory housing, dood." He rifled frantically through the clipboard. "Ah! In the Malbowges. One-room flat with all inconveniences. Excellently bad part of town, dood, er, miss."

Monty, who loathed the Malbowges, was not mollified. Her hands clenched. "This museum is a historic building and a ward of the estate of the late King Krichevskoy!" she hissed, bending down to stare the Prinny in the eye. "Does your two-bit planning committee know that? What will the Assembly say to this?"

The Prinny dropped his eyes, his voice taking on a note of sympathy. "I'm sorry, dood - miss. The Overlord has cut your funding. He's been lobbied by the businesses who took over the lease of the site. He's been trimming down a lot of his father's estate, miss. The museum's not a museum any more."

She sat down numbly in the doorway, staring fixedly at the battered floor. "What are they going to build here when I'm gone?" she heard herself ask quietly.

He coughed. "A joint amalgamation of Zarathustra's Haute Couture and House Of Needless Punching Ltd., miss."

A hopeless chuckle escaped her lips. "How can I compete? Look, you, what ever your name is..."

"Wesley, dood."

"Wesley. Cancel the compensatory accommodation, I think I'll move out of town." She adjusted her teeth into a suitable formation to lie through. "Move on. Been in the citadel a while. Get out into the country, smell a bit of fresh sulphur again. Two weeks, you say?"

He nodded.

"What provision is made for removal of my personal effects?"

Wesley lowered his squawky voice another few decibels. "Anything you want, dood. The land is all the developers want. You can take the chairs, the curtains, the carpet, if you can carry it."

The helpless rage was suddenly diluted by another emotion. She fought to keep her face straight, and patted Wesley's plush head. "Didn't you used to come here for school a few years back? I'm sure I remember you hunting through the cartography section."

The Prinny now looked quite openly sad. "Yes, d-miss."

She rose, smiling a little, and took him by the flipper. "I'd hate to see every little thing here go to waste. Is there a book you'd like to have and take with you? An atlas or anything?"

Wesley nodded fervently, and she led him into the vestibule. He trod as carefully as though he were entering a tomb.

**Here ends Part the First.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Part the Two**

I. In which we explore the virtue of breaking things

In a moment of adolescent atavism, Monty was perched awkwardly on the edge of her bed, staring at her face in the mirror.

After Wesley the Council Prinny had departed, clutching a well-thumbed copy of "Beaufort's Netherworld Atlas with ye Hilarious Intentional Mistakes for the purpose of Getting ye Unwary Tourists Snuffed, second edition", she had wandered absently through the maze of bookcases downstairs, torn between elation and terror. A torture worthy of Tantalus, she had thought. All the precious things, the things that she alone had cared for, were to be hers. For two weeks. Then they'd all get blown up.

She'd decided to fight the development. Better the books and artifacts survived, with her as their curator, than this brief ownership. She'd jotted down a politely astringent letter to the planning committee, outlining her appeal, and dashed down to the post office with it, where she had stood in line for fifteen minutes while several pucks conducted a very poorly planned robbery.

All the way home, she'd started second-guessing again, and wondering if there was some way she could get out of town with everything of value. Hers forever. The treasures of untold millennia. How much could she pack into a suitcase? How would she choose what to pack? How much, at a stretch, could she carry by herself? Where would she carry it to? Where would she keep it safe? No, there was nothing to be done but stick about and try and fight it out.

She had found herself walking into the market and spending all the loose cash she had on food supplies, and had lugged the full bags halfway down the street when she realised that her ancestral instincts were preparing her for a siege. It was a tempting notion, holing up in the old building and fighting off the demolition crew with ancient weapons, but likely to end in a long, long dungeon sentence and a destroyed museum just the same.

And here she was, back in her room, groceries littered all over the floor, looking herself quizzically in the eye, weighing up her self and finding it wanting. The face she saw was a smoky blue, dominated by a largish nose and recessed eyes, framed by curly brown hair and curving ram horns, and branded with a look of polite worry. The face, she was fine with. But even after plucking out the monocle and baring her teeth experimentally, it didn't look like it had the guts behind it to put up a good fight. The committee would rule against her, she'd lower her eyes and mutter something apologetic, and off to the Malbowges to live next door to snobby, highballing society types and their hideous kids. Work in some one-horse restaurant, serving gristly bits of horse. Or take up the succubus trade and do horribly at it.

There was a slight distortion in the mirror that was making her chin look deformed, and her anger boiled over. She punched the warpy bit of the mirror rather hard, hurting her knuckles and creating a satisfying array of spiderweb cracks.

And then it happened for the third time that day. It might have been purely the catharsis, but her reflection in the polygonic, divided glass seemed suddenly nicer-looking. She felt stronger, more confident, even a bit pretty. Unable to resist a grin, and wondering at her mood swings, she gazed fondly at herself. Was there any problem she couldn't fix by punching inanimate objects?

Oh.

She really had.

A connection that had waited a heck of a long time to be made sparked violently to life. Cake tasted better if you stabbed it. The pot and lid she used to bang together as an infant had never, ever rusted. Her father had never been able to fix the reception on the hellevision by smacking it, but she had. Indeed, after she put a large crack in the side of the casing, it could receive an extra station. Not the kind of things you attach much importance to at the time. But in hindsight - oh. Oh oh.

Her mind whirring, she rummaged through a shopping bag, pulling out a yellowish toad-apple. The horny, scaly skin was quite rough to the touch. She bit into it, savouring the crisp-yet-jellyish texture. It was a reasonable apple, but not great. A bit too much jelly, not enough crisp.

She stared long and hard at the bitten apple, turning it over in her palm, unsure quite what she was looking for. The bumps and points of the skin all seemed quite nondescript. Except that sharp angle there between a little spike and a blemish. Something about it just annoyed her. It was akin to looking at a finger-painting done in the spur of the moment and wishing you'd done just that one particular splodge a bit tidier.

You'll do, she thought grimly, and grabbed a pin off her dressing table.

With a dim feeling of having no idea what she was doing, she rammed the pin into the spot with care and malice. She felt something break, not in the apple, but somehow connected to it. As she froze, breathless, that familiar sensation of euphoria washed over her again.

She slowly withdrew the pin and bit the apple again. It tasted better.

Dropping the apple in a pile of clothes, she threw herself down on the bed with a claw-pen and parchment, and began to furiously scribble another letter.

II. Tenterhooks and other implements

The next day was horrible. Monty awoke with a splitting headache, clambered unwillingly out of bed right onto a jar of bile she had neglected to put away with the rest of her shopping, and spend the next fifteen minutes sweeping up broken glass, one hand clasped to her temple. After a dizzy, nauseous climb down the ladder, she discovered that it was mid-afternoon, the morning's class had been and gone, and they had left the front door open. The draught had scattered papers higgledy-piggledy across the foyer, and a stray Yggdrasil had wandered in off the street and was eyeing her potted plants with amorous intent.

After several more minutes of patient shoo-ing and a final, decisive few seconds of impatient kicking and hitting with sticks, the tree had taken its leave and she was able to shut the door. She tiptoed back and forth among the shelves, trying not to waken the violent parasite in her skull with the noise of footsteps, scooping up papers with one hand and bunching them into a semblance of order with the other. Even the rustling of the paper got to her after a few minutes, and she fled the draughty library for the cold stairs that creaked and ricketed their way up to the museum wing.

The museum, being much older than the other parts of the building, was mostly stone, with massive slabs making up the majority of the walls. The stairwell was cool, but not excessively chilly, with soft spiderweb curtains hanging down to brush her face and shoulders. She'd cultivated the spider population of the museum somewhat; any large bugs she caught in the library would be flung into the stairwell, never to re-emerge, and she was also careful never to break webs while doing minor dusting. The spiders seemed to have decided, over many successive generations, that she was a kind of mother goddess, dispensing wriggling manna to the hungry, and wove thick webs for her to decorate the ceiling with.

The "greeting exhibit", which had once elicited startled jumps but now only led her to grin with familiarity, was a wall-hung mutant skeleton, odd-shaped skulls and beckoning hands curving towards her from every part of its calcified frame. General Garrrbl Harrrbl Wollestonecraft, a sorcerer and tactician who served the second Overlord Fenables, had been born with a rudimentary extra head. By contemporary accounts, on the eve of his first major battle, a senior officer had made a humourous remark about the rubbery neck-growth that spilled out of the then-subaltern's collar. Young Garrrbl had then proceeded to calmly and methodically rip his superior apart and magically graft the torn appendages onto his own. This was the beginning of a downward spiral of chimeric experimentation that left the rising officer with too many body parts, a very tenuous sense of self from all the conflicting half-brains, and a prodigious talent for slaughter. So intimidating was his cicatrice of a body that he was believed to hold the hotly-contested record for Moste Pants of Foes Soil'd by Virtue of his Mere Appearance. Monty was never sure why he'd donated his body to science; possibly out of a desire to outdo any other medical exhibit, ever. She'd whiled away several fun afternoons with a textbook of demon anatomy, trying to work out which skull was his original head.

With an ironic wave to General Wollestonecraft, she wandered past him into a hall of glass cases. Some covered table-tops, some stood in cabinet-form, their horizontal surfaces almost opaque with dust. Monty did generally like to leave most of the dust alone, but today it didn't feel very important. She stopped in front of a tabletop display and carved a swathe out of its grey coating with a handkerchief.

This exhibit seemed to be a set of early diagrams of the workings and functional mathematics of catapults, complete with time-ravaged little wooden models among the papers and explanatory brass plaques. The papers, it was transparently obvious, had been filched from humans; during the epoch they dated from, demonkind had had about as much interest in mathematics as in knitting. Even worse than today, in fact. Monty reflected that if it were way back then, angry mobs would have destroyed the museum just out of principle.

Now at least they're doing it out of financial pragmatism, said an angry little voice from her aching temple, but she fought to ignore her panic of the day before and dawdled along to another case.

The upright cabinet, plastered with now-unintelligible warnings, housed a ghostly whitish shape, distorted by the old glass. She withdrew a rather full keyring from her blouse pocket and unlocked the verdigris-streaked padlock that held the cabinet door. The door, its hinges on a slight angle, swung open under its own weight, and Monty allowed herself a rare, unobscured gawp at one of her favourite exhibits.

It was a mages' staff, hanging before her in the support of the cabinet's plush velvet indentations, quite dust-free. The pattern and style was that of an old staff known now as a mjollnir, associated with noble families, but now more commonly thought of as decorative heirlooms than weapons of war. The mjollnir typically had a bulbous head with four or more curling branches radiating from it, resembling a bare tree, and often incorporating inlays of precious metals or stones into the head. This mjollnir, custom-made for a fussy duchess of the Northern Citadel some five millennia ago, was of an unusually pale wood. It had eight branches, and, perhaps suggested by this, had been carved to resemble an octopus, a small, cute sea-dweller from the human world from which many demon genuses were thought to be descended. It had no inlays or insets, save for two tiny cut rubies that served as its eyes.

The duchess had passed away shortly after, in a manner suspicious enough to befit her station - she somehow contrived to drink poisoned wine and impale herself on three separate daggers while falling down a single flight of stairs. Many of her personal effects, particularly the valuable-but-not-terribly-useful ones, had passed into collections such as this. Several cases to Monty's right, there was a battered Gae Bolga spear, also once the duchess's, which, rumour had it, had slain twelve unsatisfactory butlers. The duchess, rumour also suggested, had not been greatly mourned after her passing.

Monty had always loved the staff. It was a very beautiful work of carving in its own right, and in pristine condition - it had never seen battle, and was only part of a war museum as a unique example of the mjollnir pattern, not as a famous warrior's sidearm. If her appeal was summarily rejected and she had to leave the museum to its fate, if there was one thing she could take with her, it would be the white octopus staff.

With a thrill of daring, she reached into the case and touched the smooth wood. It felt cool and dry against her hand. Her ear didn't miss the crackle of static - the staff was clearly not a toy. The pounding in her head sweeping aside her objections, she grabbed the staff and pulled.

Anticlimactically enough, it didn't budge. Feeling foolish, she reached her other hand in and undid the cloth straps holding it in place.

"Let's try that again," she murmured sheepishly.

She stood back from the case, cradling the staff with both hands. It had a substantial weight to it, comparable to the lighter automatic weapons in the gunnery section. She hefted it, waved the tentacled head about a bit, and raised it over her head.

Suddenly furiously angry, seventy-four years' worth of very un-demonlike frustrations boiling over, she began to rail against her own restraining sense of propriety. "I could _steal_ this staff and no-one would care," she shouted at the low, arched ceiling. "No-one cares about these things! No-one knows what they are or if they even exist! I _will _steal it! I will! I'm the only one who cares about this old stuff!" She stamped a suddenly childish foot, and added vehemently: "And _screw _everybody else."

She waltzed around the stone floor, hugging the staff, her frown already twisting into a grin. "And if I get to stay in the museum, I might just keep you for myself anyway!" she babbled in a sing-song voice, smiling around at no-one in particular. "I'll just shove a dead goose into the case upside-down, none of those meatheads'll bother to look. I'll stand gravely in front of the case in a tidy little navy-blue blouse, and tell the drooling masses tall tales about the legendary Poultry Pole, used by Captain Smythe-Bolt-Titting at the great Battle of Squeaky Ceiling Fan, and they'll just grunt and throw spitballs at each other..." Dizzy, she faltered and stopped. "Oh, my head."

On an offchance, she clasped the staff tightly in her shaking hands and began to murmur the soft, curvy syllables of the Espoir psalm. One didn't live as a librarian for this long without learning a few incantations, although she had never really tried them out with an actual staff.

The staff glowed gratifyingly, a gyroscope-like ball of rays expanding outward, and she felt her headache gently tugged out of her skull as though it were caught in a comb. Her whole body relaxed, and even the itchy spot on her ear stopped itching.

"Magic is useful," she proclaimed to the dust and spiders. "I should steal ancient staves more often."

The hardened criminal's innards knotted suddenly and painfully at the distant sound of a knock on the front door. She shoved the octopus staff back into its case, secured the cloth straps and all but slammed the glass cabinet door, then bolted for the stairwell. She would really have to work on this whole panic-while-stealing thing, especially when, she scolded herself, it was something no-one knew she didn't already own.

Skidding and sliding through the library, she screeched to a halt at the front door, and pulled it open to reveal another Prinny, this one wearing the livery (more spleenery, truth be told) of a postman.

"'Afternoon, dood," he chirped blithely, digging through his pouch. "Got a couple for you, and the paper, of course - uhm?"

Monty had the envelopes out of his flippers before they were all the way out of the pouch. "Very important letters. Thankyou. Bad day to you."

"And y - " Slam. The Prinny stared bemusedly at the still-quivering door, blinked and waddled off down the street.

III. Tenterhook, line and sinker

Monty had dropped the letters the moment the door closed and was lying on her front on the floor, kicking her feet impatiently, tearing her way through the newspaper, not unlike a habitual gambler making a bee-line for the lottery results. She had a feeling that the stakes were at least comparably high. Her pulse was pounding in her ears, eyes scanning the tops of the columns.

_Prof. Jennifer's Scientific Secrets_. Professor Jennifer Carter will answer your deepest concerns from her wealth of otherworldly knowledge. With degrees in everything from nuclear engineering to flower-arranging and dental forensics, our Stunday Academic Correspondent is more than just a pretty face! Send all questions and enclosed blah blah blah.

There was her letter, sandwiched incongruously between "Help! my husband of 1920 years appears to be falling in love with me, what should I do?" and "Why won't my kettle explode like in the advertisement?" And beneath it, the answer, which took up most of the column.

_Dear Food-stabber,_

_This condition has seldom come to my notice, but it appears you may have some innate connection to the Item World._

Monty blinked, shocked but not altogether surprised, but kept reading.

_The Item World, a series of pocket dimensions contained in all tangible objects, is accessible via a medium and complex apparatus, and contains a mindscape roughly representing the intrinsic properties of its own object, complete with flaws personified as foes. Mediums, such as those employed in the Overlord's castle, are able to vibrate in sympathy with these micro-worlds, and transport themselves or others - in and out of them. This phenomenon you describe is possibly an early symptom of this ability - you are sensing flaws and enmities within objects, and destroying them by force without actually having to enter the object's world. While more focused engineering can be done within the item, to be able to do the rudiments from the outside is an impressive feat._

_I should strongly suggest you take steps to focus and shape this ability, such as applying for the proper training - item mediums are always in demand, and you would be guaranteed an apprenticeship at the very least - and ensuring that you look after yourself and your health. Developing item mediums who come under severe duress have met mysterious ends. It is theorized that they, like many of us, have the tendency to retreat into the comfort of material things when stressed, and that with their particular talents, they suck themselves into the Item World, never to be seen again. I don't wish to alarm you, but it is a little-understood field, even in the highest echelons of science, and it is wise to be cautious._

And then it was back to exploding kettles and emotional crises.

Monty exhaled jaggedly. She picked up one of the envelopes she had dropped and slit it open without looking. She waved the letter in front of her face long enough to ascertain that it was the Committee's rejection of her appeal, and tossed it aside. Her brain was cobbling little facts, ideas and outright guesses together at lightning speed, building a big old rickety ball of a plan. There were bigger things to think about than silly little two-week deadlines.

She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the tatty ceiling. Holes, imperfections, dust, lots of dust. Things inside she didn't like, things outside she liked even less. Bulldozers. Drooling demon schoolkids. Posh apartments.

It didn't matter what she thought about now, as long as it made her really stressed.

**Here ends Part the Two.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Part the Three**

I. Implosion lenses

The new boutique shop-front of Rosen Queen Co. was crowded, to say the least. The push was so fierce around the entrance that the eyeball of one rather squished zombie was actually touching the glass of the window. Perfect.

Monty spent a productive twenty minutes pushing and bludgeoning her way to the counter, letting her feet pause in optimal positions to get stepped on, diligently dropping her purse every few meters, and doing her best to think paranoid thoughts about all of her milling fellow-customers. Her eyes, independent of these chores, were roaming the shelves, searching for the items she required.

Almost there now, just one more customer. Trying not to let half her brain know what the other half was doing, she began muttering spells under her breath. Without a staff, they weren't too powerful, but regardless, the stammering incubus ahead of her kept getting more and more confused over his intended purchases, hopping with agitation and taking a good two minutes' longer than he might have otherwise.

And finally, she was at the counter. A rather nauseatingly curly-haired archer-class smiled sweetly and asked Monty how she could help her.

"Grow a beard" was the reply that sprang to her lips, but it was sensibly replaced by "Er, yes, do you carry blasting supplies? Explosives?"

The beard suggestion might have gone over a bit better; the assistant's face glazed over with suspicion. "Are you a... terrororist?"

Monty almost rolled her eyes. The stable conduit to the human world had been one of the worst decisions of Overlord Laharl's long and eventful reign, in her opinion. It wasn't the crack cocaine and the occasional low-flying aircraft, so much as the endless annoying "hot new buzzwords".

"No, dear, I'm a bloody librarian," she replied in a voice as genteel as a tailored tweed straightjacket, patting the assistant's boofy curls as patronisingly as possible. "Who else do you think uses explosives? Don't they teach you anything in school?"

She was further saddened by how easily this highly oblique bluff swept the obstacle aside. Obviously the girl had never even heard the word "librarian". She was now busily leafing through a stock register, reading aloud under her breath. "Cordite, cordite, lentonite, anfo, ammo-ni-um per-chlor-what?"

Suddenly snapping her eyes back up to meet Monty's, she asked with would-be cunning, "How do I know you're really a librarian? I'm gonna need to see some I.D and..."

Monty cut her off by withdrawing a suitably impressive wad of guff from her purse, which comprised one plain photo I.D. and thirty-odd old shopping lists. The assistant nodded and shot her eyes back to the sales book hurriedly, clearly horrified at the idea of having to examine all those papers. Her voice took on the fluid timbre of a stock phrase. "What strength and type of charge do you require?"

Monty nodded briskly, trying to maintain a calm facade. "Something around twelve kilograms TNT-equivalent, with a strong shock characteristic, but fairly pyroclastic."

The assistant mumbled and squinted at the book, then left the counter and ducked into a back room, from which she emerged shortly after with a bulky package, plastered with warning labels.

Well, that was easy, thought Monty, feeling her stress abate a little. A little too far. Blast. Hopefully she'd be able to push it up again when it came to paying for the stuff. Come on, please be exorbitantly expensive...

"That'll be two-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty hell, thank you. Will that be all?"

Bingo.

"Actually," she added as an afterthought, "do you have any Gency Exits in at the moment?"

The assistant prodded her lower lip thoughtfully. "I'll look in the pawnshop section," she replied, and bustled away again.

Monty tried to keep hold of her stress by humming a tune she found annoying, but when the assistant returned holding the crudely-shaped little red model door, she felt a crippling wave of relief wash over her. She payed the total, thanked the assistant curtly, and barged through the throng to the street outside. A little precious stress was regained when she reflected that she was now totally broke, but it wasn't enough, and she began to walk home hurriedly, under the overhang of the causeway wall, heading for the vast gates that separated the High Citadel from the lower-lying hills of the city.

The Gency Exit was the only sure-fire layman's way out of the Item World, a focus device ripped by victory from the inner substance of an item and brought back out. Having one on her would be an insurance, just in case her apparent powers weren't sufficient. She now had a means to return to normal life if all else failed, and that underlying security could be fatal. She needed more cause to dislike the place she was in.

All this considered, it was a very good piece of fortune that fifteen seconds later, she was mugged.

II. Controlled detonation

"'Ey, miss."

A hand shot rather cartoonishly out of a narrow alley in the wall and grabbed her wrist. She started violently and dropped her bag of purchases, which was yanked horizontally into the shadows before it could touch the ground.

She was pulled into the alley without a pause for breath. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom, and she identified her accoster as a grizzled rogue-class, stubbled chin and gappy teeth leering beneath his stocking-cap. Behind him stood a very fat Prinny in a waistcoat, smoking an anachronistic cigar. The rogue released her arm and stood before her, cleaning his ragged nails pointedly with a small knife.

"Whatcha got in that purse, miss?" he inquired with a grin.

"I think you should let him have a little look-see, doid," said the Prinny, cracking its flippers loudly.

"Are you... robbing me?" asked Monty in a small voice, feeling a reassuring wave of panic.

The rogue widened his grin another notch. "I were gonna put it nicer than that, miss, but sure, hand it over."

"No," she replied in an even smaller voice.

He leaned towards her at an improbable angle, whispering into her face with suitably bad breath. "See, miss, y'_could_ hand it over, right? You got hands." He paused for dramatic effect. "That can change."

The Prinny gave a low, appreciative chuckle. "I like that one, doid."

What Monty intended to do next was quite unclear to her, but fortunately the rogue dropped a hint; he inadvertently jabbed the tip of the knife just a few millimeters into the soft tissue under his own fingernail. He hopped on the spot with a surprised yelp of pain, and, sensing he might be a bit distracted, Monty quickly drew back her arm and hit him very, very hard in the face.

The effect was quite astonishing. The rogue was blasted off his feet and six feet back into a wall, his legs collecting the Prinny on the way. They collapsed on top of one another in a crumpled heap, mouths open and tongues lolling vacantly, legs twitching slightly, dislodged brick dust alighting on them from above.

As Monty scooped up her bag and ran out of the alley and down the causeway, it occurred to her that she had just punched a mugger very, very hard in the face. Now she thought about it, if she'd been beating item worlds from outside for most of her life, she was probably quite strong now. That would explain the euphoria she felt after each incident. EXP gains. Levelling up. Long-disregarded terminology from her one childhood proper-item-world experience.

Small, controlled, low-level item worlds were popular, if pricey, tourist destinations, and late one year her family had strapped on silly-looking protective gear and backpacks full of food and sharp things and trudged up to the High Citadel to join the long line of similarly-attired stay-at-homes at the castle's Item World Portal. The gatekeeper, blonde and very pretty in a red dress, had smiled unreassuringly, read a lot of safety precautions at them, and compressed them into their item, a polished battle ladle her mother had received as a wedding gift.

She'd been too young to remember it well, but the most enduring image that had stayed in her head was of a dim, uneven, ghostly plain, with scattered clumps of heather, and distant things prowling. The prowling things, when they drew closer, proved to be silly-looking low-tier ghosts, which her father, mother and older brother set about with great gusto, slashing them into fragments with kitchen knife and garden rake. Monty had felt rather unsure about the whole proceeding and hid in a comfortable heather bush, wishing her younger sister were there - she was at home with their grandma, as she'd just pupated a week earlier. She didn't remember much else, other than trudging home from the citadel later, very tired, listening absently to her father exclaiming "boy, I feel eighty years younger!" and punching the air.

Returning to the present with a jolt, she found herself already walking through the library entrance. She dropped her shopping by her desk, her heart leaping into her throat when she remembered the explosives (which fortunately remained inert) and sank down on the tattiest sofa, shivering with cumulative adrenaline. She pulled over the nearest small table and began the lengthy, nitpicking and sadly necessary pre-catastrophic letter-writing spree.

First, she wrote to her parents in the South Quarter, briefly outlining the museum's demise and adding that she'd be moving out of town and not to worry. Then to her brother at the surveying outpost, the same information but chattier - she would miss Jules, he'd never had the same air of disapproval for her not-very-evil-ness as her parents had. She wrote a rude letter to the Committee, tabulating "a list of curses she intended to place on the disputed site" - she didn't plan to, but the paranoid little jerks would waste a lot of money trying to get them all dispelled.

She penned one more missive to her only outstanding creditor, the operators of a very unpleasant drycleaners' establishment. They had sent her a heavily overcharged bill (which she had refused to pay) and then left a dead cat in her mailbox upon receipt of non-payment. The letter she penned now was attached to a rather large gift-wrapped parcel. Removal of the thick ribbon that bound it would release a powerful spring, propelling the lid upwards - and with it, approximately two dozen deceased toads and two bottles' worth of broken glass. If the dysentery didn't get them the tetanus would.

And finally, a letter to Professor Jennifer, thanking her for her earlier correspondence, with an enclosed gift of cursed jewellery she hoped would prove to be of some scientific interest. She put plenty of warning stickers on this one, so a gift of hazardous curiosities should not be mistaken for a crude assassination attempt.

A quick trip to the post office, a brief but pleasant last meal, and then it was time to build a bomb.

III. That's how we roll in Los Alamos

Monty was huddled in a mess of her dearest possessions, rocking back and forth distractedly, watching the minute tick over on the alarm clock balanced on a stack of suitcases. She wasn't panicking hard enough, and that thought alone wasn't accelerating her panic as well as she had thought it would.

She'd been poring over Item World literature for two days now, with scarcely a pause for sleep. Her first stop had been a brightly-coloured Tourist's Guide To The Item Realm. Unhelpfully enough, it had proved to consist mostly of advertisements for various undertakers' firms. Subtle.

After scouring the whole library, she'd hit on a few vital nuggets in an encyclopaedia of paranormal physics. There were accounts of mysterious disappearances similar to spontaneous combustion, which left physical damage at the surrounding site. There were little spurious but hopeful snippets, like a famous necklace confirmed to have perished in a fire, found intact and on sale in a pawnbrokers' shop twenty-six years later. And there was one chilling black-and-white full-page plate photograph in the D volume that confirmed everything she had suspected and set the whole plan truly in motion. It showed the lavish room of a young aristocrat who had allegedly dabbled in dangerously inexpert Item World ventures to fund a spiralling multiple drug habit, and had apparently committed suicide while of unsound mind and liver. It was as though a sphere-shaped area of the room had simply been deleted, or dragged into a central point. Bedposts were severed through, with no sign of the missing halves. Curtains hung in mid-flap, crescent-shaped sections cut from them as neatly as if with scissors. You just fade away until only your grin is left.

There were other, more scientific ways. But without the gizmos, you had to _scare_ yourself into the Item World, to flush your mind out of hiding and into a bigger, better hiding-place, sucking all its comfort with it. She could feel the stress building like a pressure gauge, feel her hands beginning to resonate uncomfortably with the floor.

There was a bomb outside the front door, wired to her alarm clock. Twelve kilograms of shaped charge, backed by a heap of bricks and scrap metal. Thirty seconds now until it fired. When it did, a vicious shock wave and a focused, horizontal fireball would boil through the building, shattering the stone walls of the museum and tearing the library's weaker wooden frame away like tissue-paper, incinerating anything that wasn't made of marble, searing her into a carbonized husk. You had to scare yourself into the Item World. Flush it out of hiding with fire.

Twenty-one seconds. She was stretching her arms around the pile of possessions now, trying to widen her containment field or whatever it was. Take it all with her. She had the octopus staff, her favourite clothes, some essential tools and accoutrements, food, water, two tearfully selected plants for company. She had a mind and a heart and all the best books, the only books, and fear and choked breath and a pulse that felt like a succession of smaller bombs. She had to strike a balance between being ready to die and not ready to die.

Eight seconds. It was a failsafe, or more accurately a fail-unsafe - if she didn't panic enough from the thought of the imminent bomb blast, she'd panic that she wasn't panicking hard enough, and that not panicking hard enough would get her killed. If she abandoned the plan, got up and ran, raced for the lee-side of the building, would she survive the explosion? Nope. She'd locked the windows and doors and hung the keys up in the rafters earlier, to guard against that very contingency.

And then, with one second to go, it flashed through her mind how much the little pile of possessions wasn't enough, and the final panic of losing everything else pushed her - and the whole museum - over the edge. The clock ticked over the last digit and she saw the flash through the window, then everything sucked inwards, into her and around her. The front door was flying towards her, as if blown by the shock wave, but it was bringing the wall with it, and shrinking as it came. We demons rejected less tangible things of value, pursued materialism above all else for millennia, she thought, and this is the ultimate expression of that. Am I dead?

The bomb on the front steps of the Old Acheron Military Oddments Museum and Krichevskoy Memorial Presidential Library had detonated, spewing its superheated chemical plasma forward with the force of a fast-moving glacier and considerably more heat. But almost before the gaseous jet had even touched the oaken door, the building wasn't there any more. The explosion, almost puzzled, rolled and blossomed its golden, cauliflower-like form out over the cratered, empty lot with a deep bass thunderclap that shattered every window within four blocks.

Monty had left.


	4. Chapter 4

**Part the Four**

I. Interlude

Over the dust-blown crest of the hill, black, unwieldy shapes were moving among the shabby brick walls, shaking fragments of masonry loose with a clattering rumble of archaic machinery. Like tragically un-stealthy predators, unaware that their prey had long since heard them and fled, they roared into the open space of the street and hissed and clanged to a puzzled halt.

Belching fire and brimstone from rusted, battlement-cut smokestacks, cutting a dusty swathe of destruction by means of giant sloping iron plows, dropping rivets with every movement, these were the black hulks of the Nether Citadel Council's steamroller fleet. Actually powered by steam, and dating from the equivalent human steam epoch, their appearance at any site of infrastructural importance simply said "We were feeling too cheap to fork out for a blasting-mage to get it done properly." Soot-spattered Prinnies, in poorly-secured hardhats, stared bemusedly down from the rickety machines' elevated cockpits at the marked absence of the building they had been sent to destroy.

It was a crater, not really rectangular but still much less circular than a crater is supposed to be, quite shallow and roughly uniform in depth. The dry, stony soil had been sliced away quite cleanly, and if there had been the odd mess of footprints in it, the whole scene could have been the product of a long, arduous and painstaking piece of shovel-work. But the surface was undisturbed, save for a smaller and more violent-looking crater in the west rim. And some of the larger exposed rocks had a sinister, stretched quality about them, as if softened and tugged to a central point, which if triangulated would have yielded a coordinate about a meter above ground level in the center.

This was all quite lost on the Prinnies. They clambered down from their cabs, scratching their heads under the yellow hardhats, examining crumpled site plans, kicking loose rocks about, picking their beaks.

"Dood, it's gone", stated one, rather unnecessarily.

"Sure is, dood."

"Well, what are we going to do with the eight hours on the contract, then?"

"Gee, no idea, dood," replied several in unison, gesturing at the nearby street in varying degrees of sarcasm. Several blocks away, a pub was faintly visible.

A rustle of approving nods went round the group.

"Wait! Wait, dood, wait!" squawked a straggler, as the Prinnies began to move en masse towards the street. Their heads turned back nonchalantly. "They're gonna be able to tell we didn't do it when they inspect the place, dood. It's too tidy. Shouldn't we at least scruff it up a bit?"

Reluctantly, they nodded again, and then less reluctantly nodded some more, as the fun part of this idea dawned on them. Then they raced back to their cabs, and soon the empty lot rang with the rumble and crash of bulldozers driving aimlessly in circles and occasionally ramming each other just for the heck of it. The rocky soil was squashed into deep furrows, the crater rim was crushed beyond recognition, the stretchy rocks were obscured by mud, and eventually, the former site of the Old Acheron Military Oddments Museum and Krichevskoy Memorial Presidential Library looked exactly like a bulldozed, empty lot, and no longer like a paranormal investigation waiting to happen. All that was missing were the piles of bricks that the destruction of the house should have yielded, and this had been noted; "If anyone asks, dood, we flogged the wreckage to a scrap yard," bellowed one Prinny above the din.

Fifteen minutes later, the bulldozers were abandoned once more, and the flotilla of Prinnies headed gleefully for the pub. And one Prinny, who had remained very silent through the whole process, was staring back over his shoulder as the muddy, caterpillar-track-torn acre of ground receded behind them, and his name was Wesley, and he could feel the back of his neck twitching like it wanted to jump down and leave in a hurry without him.

II. The natives are hostile

Monty awakened to a scratching sound.

There was a little light filtering in from somewhere, and she blinked in the gloom. Her cheek was resting on the wood of the floor, and her breath was shifting rivulets of dust that had shaken loose from the rafters. Her hand, which lay just within her field of vision, appeared to be fairly dusty as well. Whatever she had just done, it looked like it was going to be a pain to clean up.

Scratch, scratch. Wind blowing a broken window-frame, probably. Amazing that the place was still standing. Presumably the bomb had misfired, or they'd sold her a really weak explosive - that smug little shopgirl had probably decided not to trust her with the good stuff. She heaved herself up on her forearms, feeling as weak as a kitten, and stared around.

With all the shutters closed and curtains drawn, it was a little hard to see, but the light coming through the cracks at the edges of the windows had a yellowish tint - had she been unconscious right up until sunset? No, it wasn't red enough, it was more like dawn. Had she been out cold all night? No wonder she felt so stiff. She glanced to her right, and there was the mound of possessions she had chosen to save. Well, they were still with her, but then so was everything-sodding-else.

She rummaged in the pile and found a slightly dented chocolate bar, which she bit into morosely. It tasted fantastic, but didn't improve her mood. Time for damage assessment. She staggered to her feet and began to wander among the dust-drenched shelves. A few books knocked onto the floor, but alright. None of the plants around her desk had toppled over. No visible broken glass anywhere. A glance at the ceiling was sufficient to ascertain that none of the rafters had split. Scratch, scratch. She'd check her room and then the museum wing, although if the wooden part of the building had weathered the bomb with such indifference, the stone museum would scarcely have fared worse.

The clap spell still worked, and the ladder dropped unceremoniously. Climbing it was a real struggle this time - at one point she was genuinely concerned that she might lose hold and fall back - and it was with no little relief (and much panting) that she flopped out of the trapdoor and onto the attic bedroom's carpet.

She was barely on her feet again before she was doubled over by a fit of coughing - the attic was a small, confined space, and the dust hadn't settled quite as much. Gasping, she yanked back the curtain and undid the heavy wooden shutter that covered the attic's one window. She opened it, and stopped coughing, and also temporarily forgot how to breathe.

The sky she saw was not that of the Citadel, with its hazy blue, billows of smoke and familiar floating chunks of land. It was a brilliant golden-white, with billowing strato-cumulus clouds. She lowered her gaze, and saw a landscape that was equally alien, and yet familiar. It was a bumpy and uneven plain, with short, stubby grass, little bare hillocks of earth and vast tracts of heather. Crude stone walls, made of rounded grey-white rocks, ran at intermittent height and angle here and there, and there were spinnies of rickety-looking trees on the horizon, which had a disturbing characteristic of its own - a very visible geodesic curve, as though this landscape were part of a very small sphere.

She was in the Item World. How it had happened didn't seem terribly important right now, but she had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. And the entire house - yes, it was a house now - had come with her. She had escaped. It was all hers.

The window was easily large enough to climb through, and she emerged onto the sloping, shingled roof, feeling like a butterfly emerging from the pupa. The air was cool and fresh, the sunlight - or whatever light source it might be - was warm on her darkly-coloured sleeves, and the grand scenery stretching out before her seemed to be welcoming her to her new domain. She arched her back and stretched, sighing. It was beautiful here.

Scratch, scratch.

Except for that. What _was_ that noise? There was no wind to speak of, and no other apparent force to squeak the hinges of the downstairs window shutters, which was where the noise seemed to be coming from. Cautiously, as the slope of the roof was a little unnerving, she crawled forward down the two meters or thereabouts between her window and the edge, moving on the palms of her hands, her skirt catching on the rough shingles. She reached the edge, leaned over and peered down past the guttering.

With a stifled intake of breath, she jerked back involuntarily, letting only her eyes and the top of her head extend beyond the gutter. There was a demon crouched under her window, scraping at the wall with long, ragged fingernails. He was a pumpkin-head fiend, of slight build, but with a terrible gauntness and a hunched, animal posture. In the hand that wasn't scratching her wall was a wicked little knife, rusty and serrated, which he held drawn back as though to strike if the wall showed any signs of life.

Momentarily frozen, she stared, appalled. This was far worse than the bumbling muggers she had encountered before. This was a wild thing. It gave off a palpable sense of force, as well as a certain rank smell which made her nose wrinkle. Pumpkin-head fiends were just ordinary folk in her old walk of life, cheery and nimble sorts who were, as a rule, fond of strong ale, chasing pigeons and a game of hopscotch. This denizen of her new world was a body without a brain. She noted, with further disgust, a dark patch in the dust directly below the demon's mouth; it was drooling.

The house chose that moment to betray her; with a clatter, a chunk of guttering fell away under the weight of her hand. She leapt back from the edge, not waiting to see it fall, and clawed frantically back up the roof and into the window. As she jumped down onto the attic floor and spun around to close the shutters, she briefly saw the demon alight on the roof where she had been moments before, and her whole body shuddered; he could jump that height with such ease. She slammed the shutters and bolted them in a single motion, and barely had her hand dropped away before they rattled and banged with terrifying force. Her bed was inches away and she fought the useless urge to hide under the blankets, opting instead for the trapdoor and the ladder. She clambered through backwards and half-fell, half-climbed down to the library floor.

The rattling overhead continued, and she began to feel a modicum of security. The shutters were fairly strong, the bolt was only a few months old, and the horrible imbecility she had glimpsed in the eyes of the demon on the roof would surely prevent it from finding a way in for now. Her precaution of locking doors and windows to prevent her own escape seemed to have had an unexpected benefit. Still, no sense in wasting time. Running lightly to muffle her footsteps, she headed for the museum wing.

General Wollestonecraft's skeleton seemed to have regained its power to make her jump, or at least, in her present state of nerves. She faltered and ran past him, swearing at herself. Where was a suitable weapon? She loved the octopus staff, but she didn't want to fool around with war-magic at close quarters, particularly in light of her own inexperience. A gun would be best; something that fired a lot of bullets and didn't require a lot of skill. She could still faintly hear the rattling. Human Weapons section... automatic rifles... oh, dear, they all looked so heavy. The demon-made handguns were far lighter, but she didn't trust demon firearms; they had never been perfected as a science, and were prone to unpleasant accidents for the user.

She flung back a glass pane, which fortunately landed, without shattering, on the lid of another display, and grabbed at the smallest of the assault weapons. The display card informed her, in her own handwriting, that it was a Ukrainian Vepr, which still didn't mean anything much to her. It was a piece that had come in with the wave of artifacts from the Carter Human Invasion, and the only information she had on it had been gleaned from the maker's marks on the stock. It was pleasingly light, though.

Ammo. Blast it! Where was the ammo? Locked box under the tables. She knelt, lifted the tablecloth and rummaged blindly, pulling out a heavy strongbox, sighing with relief as she fumbled for her keyring. She'd heard that in human military museums, they didn't keep live ammunition for the firearms displays. Bet they'd feel pretty silly if a rogue pumpkin with a rusty shiv were rattling their windows. She always kept the guns in firing order; shooting a couple of rounds into the crater-pocked wooden dummy at the far end of the hall was about the only kind of exhibit demonstration that kept young school-demons interested.

Padlock off, lid lifted, pull out a clip - hopefully a full one. Too heavy to be empty, anyhow. She slotted it into the magazine-well, then pulled and clicked anything that wasn't the trigger until she was confident there was a round in the chamber. Safety off? Yup.

She stood, turned, took aim at the distant wooden dummy, and squeezed the trigger. Her arm and torso jolted, and splinters flew off the dummy's chest. In the echoey space, the report cracked like a whip. She heard the rattling upstairs pause for a moment, then start again.

"Right", she said aloud, and steeling herself, she jogged lightly back to the vestibule of the library, gripping the gun.

The rattling stopped, the pumpkin having gotten bored of this pursuit. There was a padding of feet on the roof, then a brief silence and a soft thud on the ground outside. Another pause, and then that same little scratching sound.

Shivering, she stepped closer to the window, seeing a moving shape block out the light at the edges, and called out, "What do you want?"

III. Diplomacy for the frightened

The was another flurry of ferocious activity, as the demon clawed witlessly at the shutters, which mercifully proved no more pliant than those in the attic.

Again, she shouted above the noise, "What do you want? Who are you?"

No response, save more rattling. She tried a different tack. "I mean you no harm."

This didn't prove any more fruitful. Finger just touching the trigger, she inched closer to the vibrating window, and began to discern words in the pumpkin's brittle snarling.

"Kill you, outsider, got to kill you, cut you, make you gone, outsider, hungry, not one of us," it crackled tonelessly. Its voice was like a malicious snapping of kindling, ready to burn, quite without fear or mercy, and she felt hopelessness wash over her; she should have known from the books that reasoning with this thing was going to be useless. The denizens of the Item World were, by their very nature, enemies of the real world. There didn't seem to be any way to change this. Her readings had mentioned intelligent habitants often referred to as "specialists", who understood social concepts a little better and would at least be respectful if bested by strength, but this was most definitely not one of them.

Fine, if it's war you want, then, she thought resignedly.

She backed away from the window. The demon carried on scraping. It would presumably keep doing that until some other stimulus prompted it to do otherwise. If she went outside, it would kill her if it found her. She had no way of knowing if it had a preternatural sense of smell or hearing, and it would be wise, for caution's sake, to assume it did.

Eventually she was going to have to kill it.

She contemplated firing through the shutters - a bullet would pierce the wood easily, with plenty of velocity left over for its target - but hesitated to weaken them in any way. Who knew how many other monsters were here, in this ironically savage paradise she had thought to claim? The museum would have to be her fortress from now on, and no-one wants to shoot big holes in their own shields. She couldn't face the idea of opening the shutters and trying to fire point-blank - it would probably leap through the opening and overpower her before she could shoot. Where could she find a vantage point on its position? The roof was the best, but it could scale the roof easily, and knew she could too. Where would it _not_ expect her to be?

Her body going cold from the inside out, she walked back to the ladder, placed the gun gently on the floor, and began to climb, tensed, ready to drop back down and grab the gun the moment the scraping stopped. It didn't, and she climbed until she was in reach of where she had hung the keys to the doors. Retrieving them with an outstretched hand, she returned to the vestibule below, picked up the gun, and tiptoed, heart pounding, through the looming shelves towards the back door.

The lock opened without clicking, and she gingerly pushed at the door, praying that it wouldn't creak. The hinge caught slightly, as did her breath, and her hand froze, but then the door swung smoothly open without the catastrophic saxophone-like wail she had feared. She stepped out, eyes flickering back and forth with increasingly primitive terror. Then, in a last act of confidence, she locked the door behind her. She didn't want to come back and find something else had got in. Because she was going to come back. She was going to come back. Because outside, with it, was the last place it should expect her to be.

The demon was on the wall at the front wall of the house; the back door was far down the right-hand wall. The entire length of the house hid her from her foe, but that didn't stop her walking silently in the stubbly grass, straining her ears for the scratching. There it was; it was still at it, probably in exactly the same place. Thank something for that.

Her eye alighted on the sloping rise of ground to her right, little more than a meter high, that bordered the house. If she could get behind that, she could crawl around to the front of the house without exposing herself to its view, and ideally, come up right behind it. She got down on her hands and knees and headed for the edge of the rise.

Crawling was torture. It was the longest ten minutes of her life, every instinct and fibre of muscle telling her to speed up, but knowing she would risk making a sound if she did. Her arm grew tired with the strain of the rifle, and she had to let it rest on the ground, pulling it gently for fear of accidentally firing it. The grass tickled her skin maddeningly, making a whisper against her clothes that sounded deafening at close quarters, but then so did her heartbeat. The sun and the air didn't refresh her and warm her any more; they felt hostile. Dust tickled her nose. She began to panic, second-guessing her own sense of direction, believing that she had crawled too far, not far enough, or right into the enemy's lap, until the breeze brought her the scraping again, a good way off to her left. The slope that protected her left was even gentler here, and she began to push herself up it inch by inch, using her legs, the gun now held out in front of her, gripped with all her strength.

Her pounding heart drowning out the scraping, she let her head and the muzzle of the gun peek over the rise. Before her, the slope, higher than she had thought, ran down thirty meters to the wall of her house. She had crawled around further than she had hoped, but to a perfect spot. And there - with another humming surge of adrenaline - was the pumpkin-headed demon, left of the front door, still crouched by the window, scratching. She checked the gun, nestled the stock snugly into her shoulder, and slipped a finger over the trigger.

She counted to five, and didn't fire. She counted to ten, and gave up again, shuddering. Regardless of her previous resolve, she just couldn't shoot the thing in the back. It didn't look as mean and menacing from here. She couldn't know, she couldn't be sure. Some demon I am, she thought angrily, not for the first time. It was no good - she had to give it another chance, or the doubt would reduce her to a wishy-washy shadow in all of her life's future confrontations.

Shaking hopelessly now, she half-stood, brushed grass off her shirt-front, wiped sweat off her brow, steadied the gun, and shouted, "Hey!"

The demon spun instantly, blank eyes settling on her and lumpy orange teeth clicking apart.

They watched one another intently for a few long seconds. Then the demon dropped into a crouch and sprang, flying at Monty, knife-arm drawn back to strike. There was no hesitation in its eyes, and there was no longer any doubt in Monty's heart.

She fired twice, and the bullets stopped the pumpkin-headed item-world demon in mid-air with a sickening crunch and a spray of pinkish fluid. It thrashed wildly and flopped to the ground. Before it had even stopped moving, it had vanished in the glowing red mist that Monty had seen once or twice before, long ago; death had taken it. The mist rolled, boiled and vanished.

Monty fell back onto the grass, more from the relief than the recoil, and let the euphoria of levelling up wash away some of the sour adrenaline. The sun felt warm again, the grass less prickly, the landscape one pumpkin-headed bit less hostile.

"I'll conquer this place," she whispered, giggling. "I'll be an Item Queen. With a castle full of books and plants and lots of weapons and a big purple chair and a..." Realising she was babbling like a child on a sugar high, she shook her head clear of the euphoria and got to her feet, shouldering the gun and forcing a mood of sombre reflection. Was her conscience (what was she even doing with one of those, curse it?) clear on killing other demons? Well, they seemed to be more like animals than fellow-demons, and she had given this one an awful lot of time to, say, change its mind and not try to kill her. Nope, no real soul-tugging regret there. In all honesty, she felt damned good about it.

She walked back to the house with a spring in her step and let herself in at the back door, chewing over plans in her mind. She'd have to brush up on magical and/or stabby weapons soon, she couldn't afford to rely on guns - there was no way to obtain ammo here if she ran out. The house would need cleaning, and more importantly, fortifications of some kind - shutters might not be enough to keep the next foe out. There could be plenty more out there, this world was obviously bigger than the average Item World, all her texts usually typified them as roughly flat planar chunks, whereas this was an actual globe, if a very small one.

And then there were concerns like food, water, ablutions, laundry... all the while watching out for knife-wielding, mindless adversaries. Interesting. She bared her teeth experimentally and steepled her fingers a little as she walked through the comforting gloom of the house. It felt right, somehow. This wasn't going to be so bad.

Nonetheless, she spent the rest of the day with her tool-kit, strengthening hinges and locks, fixing brackets on either side of the two doors and placing heavy lengths of timber across them (taken reluctantly from a scale model siege engine in the museum) and permanently fixing shut any window shutters that weren't of strategic value, boarding them up from inside and out with planks from disassembling the several spare bookcases in her storeroom - she was unlikely to acquire another three hundred books in this place. Having spent so many years as the museum's groundskeeper, as well as director, curator, treasurer, receptionist, janitor and nightwatchman, she'd repaired many a shaky fixture before, and the carpentry seemed both practical and oddly relaxing.

Between hammering and sawing, she spent her time on the ridge of the roof, cradling the assault rifle, scanning the horizons for movement, but there was only the wind stirring the trees. It seemed that the Item World had some kind of night and day, as the light eventually began to dim, and she stopped her excursions to the roof in order to concentrate on the task of rigging every possibly-openable door and window with wires and things that would jangle loudly if disturbed.

At ten o'clock, by her watch, she ascended the ladder to her bedroom. She raised the ladder and bolted the trapdoor, thus further insulating her citadel against an enemy breach, climbed into bed, and read herself to sleep.


End file.
